This thesis is an exploration of the links between modernist literature and film and society at a period of historical crisis, in Gramscian terms a moment of national 'popular will'. In general, these works are informed by a greater organicity of form, replacing the previous avant-garde model of a serial or mechanical structure. This organicity, however, maintains an element of disjunction, in which, as with filmic montage, the organicity is constituted on the level of the work seen as a totality. Herbert Read's aesthetics are shown to develop with these changes in the Thirties and the war years. The work of H.D. and T.S. Eliot is explored in the light of these new structural elements, and the formal questioning of the subject through the interplay of 'we' and montages of location and address in the poems. The pre-war years are portrayed in these works as a time of shame, and the war as a possible means of redemption, perhaps through suffering, or through the new subjectivity of the wartime community. The documentary movement provides an opportunity to trace these formal changes in a historical and institutional context, and with the work of Dylan Thomas, the relations between mass and high culture, film and poetry, are investigated, as well as the representation of the Blitz, in which guilt is sublimated into celebratory transcendence. These aspects, and the adaptation of a European avant-garde to meet British cultural needs, are examined in the work of the Apocalyptic movement. The last structure of feeling is reconstruction, which is related to Herbert Read's thought, but shown to inform all these other works and to be a linking-point between ideology and the structure of the text, formed as an organic unity that promises a reconstructed post-war society.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the complexities of daughterhood as portrayed by nine contemporary women writers: from former West Germany(Gabriele Wohmann, Elisabeth Plessen), from former East Germany (Hedda Zinner, Helga M. Novak), from Switzerland (Margrit Schriber) and from Austria (Brigitte Schwaiger, Jutta Schutting, Waltraud Anna Mitgutsch, Christine Haidegger). Ten prose-works which span a period of approximately ten years, from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, are analysed according to theme and character. In the Introduction, we trace the historical development of women's writing in German, focusing on the most significant female authors from the Romantic period through to the rise of the New Women's Movement in the late sixties. We then consider a definition of 'Frauenliteratur' and the extent to which autobiography has become a typical feature of such women's writing. In the ensuing four chapters we highlight in psychological and sociological terms the mourning process a daughter undergoes after her father's death; the identification process between daughter and mother; the daughter's reaction to being adopted; and the daughter's decision to commit suicide. We see to what extent the environment in which each of these daughters is brought up as well as past events in German history shape the daughter's attitude towards her parents. Since we are studying the way in which these relationships are portrayed, we also need to take into account the narrative strategies employed by these modern women writers. In the light of our analysis of content and form we are able to examine the possible intentions behind such personal portraits: the act of writing as a form of self-discovery and self-therapy as well as the sharing of female experience. We conclude by suggesting the direction women's writing from German-speaking countries may be taking.

Thesis (doctoral)--Rijksuniversiteit te Groningen. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 294-299) and index.

Thesis (doctoral)--Rijksuniversiteit te Groningen. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 294-299) and index.

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In 1990, German literary critics agreed that the end of the Cold War should mark the end of politically committed post-war literature. The political caesura prompted a debate about the future of German literature during which the concept of 'readability' evolved as a contested issue. It was championed in particular by the author Matthias Politycki and the publishers Uwe Wittstock and Martin Hielscher. Ever since, 'readability' has remained a benchmark for authors and critics alike in the battle for value and success. The thesis will establish a theoretical basis for 'readability' that draws on narratology, the Aristotelian concept of 'mimesis', classical rhetoric, and the poetics of contemporary authors who explicitly engage with 'readability'. Discussion will centre on the novel since this genre has been the focus of debate ever since the novel gained prominence with the rise of the reading middle classes in the eighteenth century. An analysis of the historical role of 'readability' will demonstrate that the debate as it manifested itself around 1990 developed out of a specifically German tradition, in which authors and critics alike viewed it as potentially in conflict with true art. In 1990, German literary critics agreed that the end of the Cold War should mark the end of politically committed post-war literature. The political caesura prompted a debate about the future of German literature during which the concept of 'readability' evolved as a contested issue. It was championed in particular by the author Matthias Politycki and the publishers Uwe Wittstock and Martin Hielscher. Ever since, 'readability' has remained a benchmark for authors and critics alike in the battle for value and success. The thesis will establish a theoretical basis for 'readability' that draws on narratology, the Aristotelian concept of 'mimesis', classical rhetoric, and the poetics of contemporary authors who explicitly engage with 'readability'. Discussion will centre on the novel since this genre has been the focus of debate ever since the novel gained prominence with the rise of the reading middle classes in the eighteenth century. An analysis of the historical role of 'readability' will demonstrate that the debate as it manifested itself around 1990 developed out of a specifically German tradition, in which authors and critics alike viewed it as potentially in conflict with true art. The thesis will demonstrate that 'readability' is key to understanding the debates about German literature in an era of globalisation when readers are more attracted to works by foreign authors than to works by German ones. It will examine how writers such as Helmut Krausser, Daniel Kehlmann, and Thomas Glavinic have exploited the opportunities of the changed parameters by writing and promoting 'readable' books. It will further explore to what extent 'readability' has opened up new avenues even for authors like Felicitas Hoppe and Ulrike Draesner, who distrust the quest for 'readability'. The thesis will conclude with a reflection on the prospects for 'readability' in the current literary landscape in Germany.

This thesis is the first book-length study of Johannes Schiltberger's Reisebuch, the German-language account of the Bavarian crusader's approximately 30-year captivity and enforced travels in the Middle East under the Ottoman sultan Bayezid I (r. 1389-1403), the Turko-Mongolian warlord Timūr (r. 1370-1405) and his successors. It investigates the Reisebuch's representation of the Orient. My reexamination of the manuscript and print transmission from c. 1450 to 1600 has shown that there were various versions of the Reisebuch in circulation, and I base my reading of the work on this basic multiplicity and variety. This variance is pertinent for a literary interpretation of the Reisebuch because the manifest narrative and material transformations go hand in hand with differing thematic foci, narratological and representational strategies, so that one can confidently contend each version of the Reisebuch negotiates a distinct relationship with the eastern 'other'. I argue that the transmission diverges into three strands as (1) an abridged chronicle that emphasises the complexity of political and military relations in the East; (2) a proto-ethnographic account with a focus on religious diversity; and (3) six paratextual reconceptualisations of the Reisebuch as Turcica in early print. In short, my study engages with the transmission and transformation of material, on the one hand, and with the consequences of this creative process for cultural ideas, on the other: it asks what role 'rewriting' - deliberate and inventive adaptation - plays in the Reisebuch's portrayals of the East. My thesis therefore provides not only the first in-depth reading of Schiltberger's Reisebuch as a 'medieval multi-text' (a term coined by Iain Macleod Higgins to indicate the inter-textuality and intra-textuality common to the medieval travel account) but highlights its representational process as multiple, polyvocal and dynamic.

By setting the writings of Etel Adnan, Annie Dillard, Marilynne Robinson and Rebecca Solnit into dialogue with those of the New England Transcendentalists, this thesis proposes a New Transcendentalism that both reinvigorates and reimagines Transcendentalist thought for our increasingly intersectional and deterritorialized contemporary context. Drawing on key re-readings by Stanley Cavell, George Kateb and Branka Arsić, the project contributes towards the twenty-first-century shift in Transcendentalist scholarship which seeks to challenge the popular image of New England Transcendentalism as uncompromisingly individualist, abstract and ultimately the preserve of white male privilege. Moreover, in its identification and examination of an interrelated poetics and politics of liminality across these old and new Transcendentalist writings, the project also extends the scope of a more recent strain of Transcendentalist scholarship which emphasises the dialogical underpinnings of the nineteenth-century movement. The project comprises three central chapters, each of which situates New Transcendentalism within a series of vertical and lateral dialogues. The trajectory of my chapters follows the logic of Emerson s ever-widening circles , in that each takes a wider critical lens through which to explore the dialogical relationship between my four writers and the New England Transcendentalists. In Chapter 1 the focus is upon anthropological theories of liminality; in Chapter 2 upon feminist interventions within psychoanalysis; and in Chapter 3 upon the revisionary work of Post-West criticism. In keeping with the dialogical analogies that inform this project throughout, the relationship examined within this thesis between Adnan, Dillard, Robinson and Solnit and the nineteenth-century Transcendentalists is understood as itself reciprocal, in that it not only demonstrates how my four contemporary writers may be read productively in the light of their New England forebears, but also how those readings in turn invite us to reconsider our understanding of those earlier thinkers.

Between 1880 and 1930, the British Empire's vast infrastructural developments facilitated the incorporation of large parts of the globe into what Immanuel Wallerstein and others have called the capitalist 'world-system'. Colonial literature written throughout this period, in recording this vast expansion, repeatedly cites imperial infrastructures to make sense of the various geographies in which it is set. Physical embodiments of empire proliferate in this writing. Railways and trains, telegraph wires and telegrams, roads and bridges, steamships and shipping lines, canals and other forms of irrigation, cantonments, the colonial bungalow and other kinds of colonial urban architecture - all of these infrastructural lines break up the landscape and give shape to the literature's depiction and production of colonial space. In order to analyse these physical embodiments of empire in colonial literature, this thesis develops a methodological reading practice called infrastructural reading. Rooted in a dualistic, yet connected use of the word 'infrastructure', this reading strategy works as a critical tool for analysing a mutually sustaining relationship embedded within these literary narratives. It focuses on the infrastructures in the text, both physical and symbolic, in order to excavate the infrastructures of the text, be they geographic, social or economic - namely, the material conditions of the world-system that underpinned Britain's imperial expansion. This methodology is applied to a number of colonial authors including H. Rider Haggard, Olive Schreiner, William Plomer and John Buchan in South Africa and Flora Annie Steel, E.M. Forster, Edmund Candler and Edward Thompson in India. The results show that the infrastructural networks that circulate through colonial fiction are almost always related to some form of anti-imperial resistance, manifestations that include ideological anxieties, limitations and silences, as well as more direct objections to and acts of violent defiance against imperial control and capitalist accumulation. In so doing, the thesis demonstrates how this literary-cultural terrain and the resistance embedded within it has been shaped by, and has in turn shaped, the infrastructure of the capitalist world-system.

This thesis constructs a history of reading for South Asia (1857-1914) through an examination of the eccentric relationships that marginal colonial agents and subjects - soldiers, peasants, office clerks and women - developed with everyday forms of writing. Drawing on the methodologies of the history of the book, and literary and cultural histories, it creates a counterpoint to the dominant view of imperial self-fashioning as built on reading intensively and at length. Instead, it contends that the formation of identities in colonial South Asia, whether compliant or dissenting, was predicated on superficial forms of textual engagement, leaving the documents of empire most likely misread, unread, or simply read in part. I illustrate this argument through four chapters, each of which brings together extensive archival material and nonliterary texts, as well as both canonical and little-known literary works. The first two discuss the circulation of unread texts in colonial institutions: the army and the government office. I study Garnet Wolseley's pioneering war manual, The Soldier's Pocket-book for Field Service, a book that soldiers refused to read. This is juxtaposed, in the second study, with an examination of the reception of the bureaucratic document in illiterate peasant communities, explored through the colonial archive and ethnographic novels. In the third and fourth chapters, I focus on texts consumed in part. I turn to the Bengali Hindu almanac, a form that made the transition from manuscript to print in this period, and examine how it trained its new-found readership of English-educated office clerks to oscillate smoothly between British-bureaucratic and local forms of time, as well as to read quickly and selectively. I end with a study of The Indian Ladies' Magazine, and suggest that the cosmopolitan form of the periodical and editorial practices of extracting and summarising gave women unprecedented access to a network of global print.